Some years ago, I attended a family reunion. Most of my grandmother’s 11 siblings were there, and they excitedly called me into the living room to see something remarkable: an old Super-8 film of my great-grandfather on his Lousiana farm, presiding over the slaughtering of a pig.
I felt a sick horror as I watched the thrashing body of the pig, suspended from a tree as its lifeblood spilled out into a metal tub. I looked around the room and there were smiles on most of the faces. Not malicious smiles, just a bunch of siblings recalling the glory days of their rural youth. They knew what it takes to kill and eat a pig, and they had long ago gotten completely comfortable with that reality. They had, as far as I’m concerned, earned the right to eat meat: they had obtained their meat from its source. (I hadn’t earned it. These days, I rarely touch meat, and the discomfort of that moment marked a turning point.)
If you listen closely to a pig’s squeals and grunts, you quickly discover a surprisingly expressive range of sounds. It’s easy to ascribe emotions—contentment, frustration, terror—to those earthy emanations. Those sounds are the primary element of One Pig, the new relase from U.K. musician Matthew Herbert.
Herbert creates the sonic equivalent of concept art, stuff that sometimes sidesteps the question of “good” or “bad” music by raising larger issues like what qualifies as music. One doesn’t enjoy a Herbert album so much as experience it. One Pig is hardly an aberration; Herbert is known for his use of unusual samples, and has created music from found sounds of all sorts, from the noise of thousands of people simultaneously biting into apples to the sound of a tank driving over a recreation of the meal Nigella Lawson cooked up for Tony Blair and George W. Bush.
One Pig, the third of a trilogy of albums, follows the life of a single pig from birth to dinner plate, and Herbert obtained his sounds by recording the pig on a farm in England. The album also incorporates the sounds of a “musical pig sty,” a group of strange instruments created from pig parts, from the more obvious pig skin drum to the truly unusual, an organ which produces sound through the interaction of pig blood and tuned reeds.
The album quickly created a stir. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) issued a statement about Herbert’s album—before a single sound was committed to CD. From the statement: “No one with any true talent or creativity hurts animals to attract attention … Pigs are inquisitive, highly intelligent, sentient animals who become frightened when they are sent to slaughterhouses, where they kick and scream and try to escape the knife. They are far more worthy of respect than Matthew Herbert or anyone else who thinks cruelty is entertainment.”
There is a central problem with PETA’s pre-emptive attack, one which might have been obvious had PETA’s members held fire until the album’s release: One Pig makes eating a porkchop a lot more uncomfortable. It’s also clear that Herbert didn’t actually hurt any animals, and questionable whether his album is meant as entertainment. It’s not that One Pig is vegetarian propaganda—Herbert eats meat—it’s more that his work, in a far more artful fashion than that old Super-8 film, accomplishes the uncomfortable task of bringing to light the reality our modern food production system hides. It takes a lot of slaughter to fill all our grocery stores with plastic-wrapped cuts of meat. U.K. law wouldn’t allow Herbert to record the moment of his pig’s killing.
Herbert offered PETA a well-thought response. It read in part, “[I] was there to learn, not to preach, prod or adapt the recordings to some hidden agenda. The pig was always going to be killed, and for me to not bear witness to that difficult fact, would have been to cheat myself and the listener from the friction that comes from raising animals for food. … Because of a perverse and secretive food system in the U.K., I don’t have the rights to see how my food is kept, killed or prepared and consequently I wasn’t allowed to record the actual death of my pig. I think that this is the real outrage. … Should it not be a legal right for the public to see what methods are used to grow, harvest and prepare what they put in their bodies?”
It’s important to note that, controversy aside, Herbert is a sophisticated creator of music. Whatever one thinks of his methods, he manages to take raw, unusual sounds of all kinds and blend them, mad-scientist style, into well-thought compositions that draw the listener into a gripping journey. One Pig is hardly a party album, and its mood is often melancholy, even horror-filled. It’s a strange voyage with engaging rhythmic passages and masterful evocations of emotion. When, near the end, you hear the smacking of human lips as the pig is devoured, you might well long for a signpost about how to feel. It’s a credit to Herbert’s artistic vision that he offers no obvious answers, and closes the album with a quiet piece of acoustic folk music whose (seemingly unrelated) lyrics offer nothing but questions.
